GoogleFOAM is BORN!

As the FOAM community expands beyond the EM and Critical Care realms, so to does the need to search the expanding content.  What began as a tool I created for myself morphed into EMGoogle.com, and now to GoogleFOAM.

I will be adding Refinements to the Custom Search Engine over the next few weeks that will allow you to search the growing FOAM universe in specific realms. I plan specific Ultrasound, Rural/General Practice/Family Medicine (GP/FM), PreHospital and Retrieval Medicine (PHARM), and Anaesthesia refinements initially.  More will be added as subject areas in the FOAM arena mature to require it.

I want to add an EMCrit’s Journals Refinement, but PubMed, Google Scholar and the big publishers make it quite difficult to search individual journals or groups of journals via the Custom Search Engine. If anyone has experience with journal searches with a Google CSE please let me know.

Refinements work by searching the entire GoogleFOAM universe, but present results from sites in the specific subject area first. There is an option to search ONLY those sites related to the Refined Subject area (I have not enabled this yet) – I look forward to your feedback on how best to use and develop this function.

There will be some (often a lot) of overlap within these refinements because some sites (notably Life in the Fastlane) contain content that crosses the boundaries between these areas. As always, if you are using the search engine and find things missing or out of context please let me know at taraine at hotmail dot com.

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